The sleepy town of Exeter has become the site of the country’s bitter battle over universities. Three weeks ago, his local university announced plans to lay off 150 teaching and support staff. The managers are expected to escape unharmed; Stream learning and research will remain largely intact. According to the university’s union, eighty-five percent of staff at risk of redundancy are in the humanities. Britain’s thinkers are upset. Rowan Williams has expressed concern about the decline of “humanistic and cultural education”. Rory Stewart has called the situation “disturbing”. A petition to stop the redundancies has received 30,000 signatures.
If the cuts go ahead, the university’s 60-member English faculty will shrink by a third, according to a source within the department. They claim that the staff who remain have been told they will have to take on double their usual teaching load. Any decline in research activity will cause a financial catch-22 for the university: successful researchers bring in outside funding, much of which they never see themselves. It can cost £10,000 to take a social science test. Grant figures will have to rise to cover a university’s “asset costs”, meaning building maintenance and bills, as well as “indirect” or administrative costs.
Exeter University says “this is still an ongoing consultation, involving colleagues across the university, about possible changes and… we hope to achieve these changes through voluntary measures. We are working closely with our community and unions to avoid compulsory redundancies wherever possible.” He told the BBC that there were no proposals to close departments and that he would “continue to have one of the largest faculties of humanities, arts and social sciences in the UK”.
“It will be more difficult for us to write (research) articles,” says a lecturer in the English department. “If our teaching hours increase, there won’t be time for those things. And our place in the Russell Group will be lost, and our contribution to the Ref (Research Excellence Framework, a metric for the quality of a university’s research) will decrease, and we’ll just be hemorrhaging money. So it doesn’t make financial sense.”
After an initial notification, Exeter staff had to wait hours to find out if they were eligible for redundancy. They will spend another two months waiting for a final decision. Meanwhile, management will evaluate staff against eight vague criteria: research excellence, research funding, strategic future scope of research, educational excellence, breadth of education provision, strategic future scope of education, leadership and management, and citizenship. Managers have already started completing the letter of assessment work on behalf of the staff at risk. Sometimes the forms are wrong, but many academics are refusing to correct the information about them. To do so would feel too much like a gesture of consent to their excess.
The university’s decision to make cuts may seem reasonable to some. Britain’s higher education sector is already shrinking at an alarming rate. There are layoffs and mergers almost every month. In May, the University of Hertfordshire said it would suspend some undergraduate humanities courses. New students will not be able to learn English and creative writing, history, philosophy and linguistics. A week later, the University of Nottingham announced it was to shed 600 jobs, with 2,700 academic staff at risk of redundancy. In 2025, the university management suspended the recruitment of new students for degrees in music and foreign languages. The current proposals would see a permanent end to these departments. At Sheffield, minor cuts in chemistry, materials science and East Asian languages can spread across a wider range of humanities subjects. Last year, the University of Sussex made 528 staff redundant, with plans to increase this figure by 200.
You can wish the best for the rest and still understand why courses across the country are being shortened. Some courses are simply undersubscribed. An alarming number of British higher education institutions are facing financial deficits. Brunel is £56m. Essex is £23 million. Nottingham’s is £85m, although some members of the University and College Union (UCU) have attributed this to unwise property investment rather than recruitment or retention issues.
Successive governments have created a very difficult environment to support universities. At £9,790 a year, the university tuition cap often not enough to finance a university education. Universities are allowed to charge overseas students more. But dependence on international recruitment means that British institutions are vulnerable to world events beyond their control. There was an extreme example of this in 2024 when the Nigerian naira crashed and left several students at Teesside University penniless. Something similar could happen now the rupee is falling against sterling.
Anxiety based on immigration has caused even more trouble. The Tories banned overseas students from bringing dependents to the UK. some have linked this to a decline in international registrations. The length of a post-graduate work visa will soon be cut from two years to 18 months, and from August 2028 universities will have to pay the government £925 a year for every international student they recruit. While the tax is supposed to return investment in higher education, the sector thinks the potential increase in tuition could cause another drop in out-of-state applicants.
Some government funding schemes are available to close the gaps, but no one can believe they will still be around in ten years’ time. One is already gone. Since 2012, universities have been able to apply for strategic priority grants – extra funding for high-priority, high-cost subjects, distributed according to student numbers. These grants are tiered, with the highest amounts for medicine and science courses, and the lowest for archaeology, computing, creative and performing arts and nursing. last week, said Bridget Phillipson it would allocate funding to the lowest rungs of the scheme.
After the end credits, a viewer can assume all of them University repayments are logical business decisions. But the Exeter case makes very little financial sense. The university is one of the most attractive institutions in the Russell Group. It is prestigious enough to serve as a viable Plan B for nervous Oxbridge applicants, and its humanities subjects generally rank high in national league tables. Its financial report from 2025 shows that the university had an operating surplus of £8.2m and that there was a slight increase in income from research grants and trumpets “a year of continued financial stability”.
The university is losing out on international recruitment but has seen “strong continued interest” from domestic students. Recruitment for undergraduate English is steady and student numbers are increasing in some departments, including history and film. There is little evidence to suggest that these numbers will decrease. Infrastructure costs also fail to explain the target for the cuts: English students do not need access to labs, gyms or art facilities.
“I think these people are not being honest,” says Michael Flexer, an English lecturer and co-chairman of UCU Exeter, when talking about university management. “When we push an excuse (for job losses), after a while it folds and they give us another excuse.” Flexer thinks the motivation is “ideological” not financial, and believes any surplus savings will only increase the university’s managerial caste. of higher the band in Exeter’s salary scale, reserved for a “small number of professors who bring great prestige to the university”, is DETERMINED around £120,000. In the 2024-25 academic year, Exeter’s vice-chancellor made £392,000. Exeter denies the plans have any ideological motivation: “The university has been very open about the financial reasons behind the proposals.” He also denies that the cuts will not affect jobs at the managerial level.
Exeter initially claimed in an internal meeting with English department staff that the job losses were in line with the government’s ten-year industrial strategy. A government of 2025 REPORT The strategy outlines policy measures for higher education, including cuts to the lowest grant rates of strategic priorities and additional funding facilities for “defence skills provision”. The report also boasts of the UK’s existing capabilities in higher education, citing statistics about its “world-leading research”, full-time job creation (385,500 in 2021-2022) and its “education-related exports”.
A UCU member says the university stopped using the claim days after first making it, although the university denies it has taken its focus off industrial strategy, adding: “There is a growing drive to push the sector towards greater specialisation. It is also clear that the government wants universities to focus their research and teaching activities on areas where they can demonstrate genuine academic strength, as well as at those levels of government.” Flexer says “local MPs and the TUC’s Kate Bell, who is on the government’s (industrial strategy) advisory group, deny any justification for the redundancies under the government’s industrial strategy”.
At-risk staff are not supposed to know about each other’s redundancy status. But one lecturer found little solace in a list of at-risk staff sent to her by mistake. There were impressive senior colleagues in it. “Geniuses,” she says. “Extremely remarkable people.” In a tight job market, redundancy proposals like these are the only equalizer. You can do everything right, and someone will find a way to get rid of you.
(Further reading: The Fall of Don Oxbridge)
